Word: marching
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...march on Washington that gays staged Sunday on the National Mall drew something like 200,000 people - that's a good guess based on conversations with many of the organizers and local authorities, although estimates of Mall crowds are notoriously unreliable. But one number you can take to the bank: the average age of those backstage who wore walkie-talkie headsets and staff badges, the men (and a few women) who were behind much of the organizing effort, wasn't over 30. And that, by far, was the oddest thing about the march: Why would a generation wired to their...
...answer became more clear after I spent much of the day with Wayne Ting, born Dec. 1, 1983, and - when he's not helping organize marches on Washington - works as an associate at a private-equity firm that he isn't quite convinced he wants to name. Like many of the others who helped organize the march, Ting was shocked - deeply, if rather naively - by the passage last year in California of Proposition 8, which ended the court-appointed practice of equal marriage rights for gay couples in that state. (See a visual history of the gay-rights movement...
...What Prop 8 did for my generation," Ting told me the night before the march, at Restaurant Nora, "is that unlike past generations before, we had never been through something like where progress didn't seem inevitable. Suddenly, some right that was given was taken back. I think that had a huge effect on my generation - to say, wait a minute, you mean, if I voted for and maybe wrote a check to the Democratic Party, that's not enough...
...moved on gay issues: Ting has such a strong sense of entitlement that a routine historical occurrence in democracies - the snatching back of rights that have been reluctantly given to despised minorities - came as a surprise to him. It is that sense of entitlement that led to today's march, which Ting and so many of his cohort put together...
They didn't do it alone, of course. The macher behind the march was Cleve Jones, 55, a man who, in his younger days, was a compatriot of Harvey Milk's and, later, the conceiver of the most powerful work of American folk art, the AIDS quilt. Last year, Jones found himself in the spotlight again after the film Milk reminded the nation of what his close friend Harvey had died for. With relentless encouragement from David Mixner - a longtime gay activist and occasional friend of Bill Clinton's - Jones decided to pay attention to all the e-mails...